Shaking Things Up

Disrupting, enabling, reinventing the system – whatever you want to call it, a shift in the status quo is alive and well in the UAE

- Georgina Lavers

Arguably, there is no word that more accurately sums up the first half of 2020 than “disruption”. There has been disruption to our healthcare systems, public transport, economies and lifestyles – with most changes putting significant and negative strain on established systems. At the moment, reading the term in a news headline is to guess that the story inside will most probably not be positive.

Paradoxically, for the last 25 years, disruption has been the ultimate ambition of companies straddling varied sectors, from steel to telecoms or cinema, and most geographies. Now – perhaps more than ever – disruption is a real and vital necessity for businesses that wish to flourish amidst upheaval.

Over the past decades there has been discussion about how, exactly, it should be defined. A prevalent (if unnerving) trend is to avoid its definition whatsoever; a raft of businesses coming into the market will invariably have the ‘disruptive’ label duly slapped on them by their PR, used as a catchall term for being vaguely innovative.

In a seminal article from 1995, Harvard Business Review makes the useful distinction between disruptive and “sustaining innovations”, offering examples for the latter such as the addition of a fifth blade to a razor, or a mobile phone provider that offers better reception. Both are useful examples of an incumbent company offering value-add to its customers, but neither is particularly disruptive.

A disruptive company, the article posited, would not look at adding helpful features or exceeding the demands of its customers. Instead, it would do the very opposite: ignore the majority, and focus on technologies that did not address the needs of most of its customers.